Tag Archives: writing
Interesting Inconsistency vs. Efficiency
People are inconsistent. We must be; we’re alive, living, responding, changing. Funny thing is, in the West we’re often taught that this is a bad thing. It isn’t efficient. It isn’t dependable. It goes against all kinds of Protestant ethics of order and purpose and such. But in Eastern cultures, it’s often celebrated. “If you see the Buddha in the road, kill him.” When the Buddha becomes a monolith, a never-changing dogma, it is no longer a life-giving source. I look to historical information and try to understand why people did what they did for a living now; I’m a historic interpreter. I keep fighting this penchant for landing on the “right answer”, the one that describes order and purpose and makes sense. I’m learning more that the joy of interpreting history is found in saying “we don’t know why”. We’re quirky; isn’t that marvelous? We change, we evolve, we digress, we’re capricious. In many cultures, gods were like that, too. It was acceptable, maybe expected. But in Western theology, that became a bad characteristic for a god, and immutability became important. We want something dependable, something stable, so much that we’re willing to construct it and enshrine it. Why? Because it allows us to stop trying to be responsible in the world? The effort of responding is perhaps a constant drain, and we are lazy by nature? I think of cultures that are resilient, flexible, responsive to the environment, and I think that consistency is maybe not that important or beneficial after all.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1830
What made me think about this? I was looking into Wisconsin history, and the history of the Upper Peninsula, and came across the story of Henry Schoolcraft. His first wife was half Ojibwa and helped him in his scholarship of Native American cultures. His second wife wrote a popular anti-Tom novel in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous book and disapproved of mixed-race unions, thereby alienating her stepchildren completely. Why would the same man be married to both of these women? “I don’t know why.”
Bookshelf at the Raspberry School, Old World Wisconsin
I recognize in myself a tendency to try to put my partner in a box, to figure out the consistent rules that will help me predict his behavior. There aren’t any, really. But he is hardly a sociopath. He simply wants to be allowed to communicate his thoughts and feelings as they arise, to be understood in the moment, known intimately for the authentic and complicated man he is. He is more than willing to talk and reason and explain honestly and even to make promises and act on them in order to gain my trust. Perhaps it is simply my natural laziness that wants to put labels on him and save myself the trouble of paying attention. Truly caring about a person requires great effort. It is hardly efficient. It necessitates all kinds of little adjustments. And that is a valuable process, a craftsmanship of sorts. Which reminds me of this clip my brother-in-law sent me which he titled: Precision East German manufacturing in the workers paradise. I’m not sure if he was trying to be cynical. I think it illustrates a very authentic part of human process.
Enigmatic and Ethereal
The land is parched. It hasn’t rained for more than two weeks, and that was just a shower, really. Clouds gather and pass, rain pummels areas just to the north or south or west, but not here. Water vapor hangs in the air; the humidity makes the evenings sticky. The ceiling fan keeps up a tinny hum, the slight breeze causing a cooling evaporation on the surface of my exposed skin as I try not to move. Oh, but if I inch over the cotton sheet, I might find a cooler surface…just there…maybe?
I glance out the window to see if the maple leaves are moving, quivering, even a little bit. They are still, and the moon is full. It looks so cool and pale in the dark sea above. I have to go outside and stand under it. Perhaps its snow white radiance will bring an icy wind from space. I invite Steve to join me for a night walk. I put on just a sheer sundress, slip into sneakers, and grab my camera. The neighborhood is quiet. Televisions and air-conditioners keep the people shut up inside their suburban catacombs while we explore the world above…above the rooftops, above the concrete, above the tangible, above and beyond comprehension. Where we are is no longer “Milwaukee”, it is in space, outside of time, anywhere and everywhere. We are moving through existence. We are.
Alice Through My Lens
Blue eyes. That was one thing that made her unique among 4 sisters. She had our father’s eyes. She was the shortest among us; I believe I grew to have at least a half an inch over her. But that took a while. Since she was 3 years older, I trailed behind her most of my life. I definitely didn’t mind following in her footsteps. I adored her. She was the sweet sister, the kind one, the one who loved children and animals and had friends. She somehow spanned the gap between being a nerd and being popular. Not that she wasn’t picked on early in grade school. We all were, and she was very sensitive to it. When she was 10, she ran away from a boy who was chasing her down the sidewalk. He caught up to her and managed to grab the back of her coat hood. He yanked her down hard, and she fell backwards onto the sidewalk, hitting her head and fracturing her skull. The boy was sent to military school, and Alice recovered amid cards and gifts and angels surrounding her bed.
She started dating first among us, though she wasn’t the oldest. I wanted to learn how this “boyfriend” business worked, so I watched her very closely, sometimes through the living room drapery while she was on the porch kissing her date goodnight. She modeled how to be affectionate in the midst of a distinctly cerebral family, shy about demonstrating emotion. She gave me my first pet name: Golden Girl or Goldie, and then the one that stuck in my family, PG or sometimes Peej. By the time I was 16, we were very close friends as well as sisters. She invited me to spend Spring Break with her at college, and enjoyed “showing me off”. She told me that the boys were noticing me and that she’d need to protect me. I was thrilled!
Alice and Mike in Los Gatos, summer 1979
We spent that summer at home together in California. I introduced her to my new boyfriend, who eventually became my husband. She begged our parents to allow me to be her passenger on a road trip back to campus at the end of the summer. She had just bought a car, and although I couldn’t drive, I could keep her company, sing with her along the way, and be her companion. The road trip was a travel adventure flavored with freedom, sisterly love, and the sense of confidence and brand new responsibility. We flopped the first night in a fleabag motel in the same bed. She woke earlier than I and told me as I roused and stretched how sweet I looked cuddling the stuffed bunny my boyfriend had bought me. Then we stayed with her friends in Colorado. Our next day’s journey was to go through the heartland of the country and hopefully, if we made good time, get to Chicago for the night. We never made it.
Nebraska is flat and boring. We’d been driving for 6 hours. I was reclined and dozing when we began to drift off the fast lane, going 80 mph. Alice over-corrected, and we flipped. She had disconnected her shoulder strap, and flopped around, hitting her head on pavement through the open window. Her fragile, gentle head, with two blue eyes. She was dead by the time we came to rest in the ditch.
Life is an experience, a journey of unexpected and unimagined happening, a verb in motion, not a noun. Alice was in motion, at 20, and may be even now…somewhere, in some form. I still taste her sweetness floating near me from time to time.
Three of four sisters, Christmas 1978
I Promised My Mother-in-law
I promised to dedicate a post to my mother-in-law for her birthday, which was the 16th. The last time I saw her alive was on her birthday in the year 2001. She died sometime the following week, alone in her apartment, while we were traveling. That fact is consistent with the mystique I associate with remembering her. I’ll never be certain who she really was, although I have many theories. I have been told that she was a concert pianist as a young woman and that she played for Rachmaninoff when she was 16. I have seen the signed program portrait that he gave her. I did hear her play as an accompanist for our community theater. She was definitely capable, even with arthritis. I wish I had known the passion of her younger years. I saw in her such a mixture of joy and anxiety as a mature woman. She had a playfulness and sense of humor that I found completely amusing, so much more casual than my own mother’s. She was a grade school teacher with the ability to relate to people in a very natural way. She was sentimental about cats and dogs and friendship and children. As I learned more about her relationship with her mother, though, a very painful history emerged, steeped in shame and punishment. I’m sure that was the root of the depression that lingered throughout her life. She carried scars and secrets with her to the grave. We only learned about them when her sister-in-law spoke up after the funeral. I imagine, though, that she would have liked to allow the sunniest parts of her personality to shine through unclouded. It was her ability to laugh in the face of fear that I illustrated at her memorial service when I told this story:
In June of 1992, she came out to visit us from California. We had only been living in Illinois since August, and Jim had been through an emergency cardiac procedure that January. She came out eager to see him recovering and to bask in the hugs of her four grandchildren. He had a scheduled check-up during her stay, and learned that his arteries were even more clogged than in January. He was advised to undergo double bypass surgery as soon as possible. He was 31. She decided to extend her stay indefinitely and see what happened next. Her anxiety was tremendous, and so was mine. Her sense of humor, however, surfaced much more readily. It was her coping strategy, and it matched his perfectly. The day of the surgery was stormy and dangerous. A tornado touched down in the vicinity of the hospital and cut out power just as he was coming out of surgery and off the breathing machine. A frantic nurse grabbed a mouth tube and bag to squeeze air into his lungs. Marni and I were shaking all over and clutching hands as we watched. Moments later, the generators kicked in and a calmer air prevailed. Jim was breathing unassisted, and he was motioning me to come closer to tell me something. I leaned in to hear him say in a hoarse whisper, “They found out what was wrong with my heart.” “Yes, dear…” “When they opened me up, they found this!” His hand moved under the bedsheets by his side. I looked down and discovered that he was clutching the broken figure off of one of his bowling trophies. “The Bowler” was a running gag we had started the first year of our marriage. He surfaced in Christmas stockings, random drawers, and even in the bouquet of roses Jim brought onstage after my senior voice recital. How in the world did Jim manage to stage another practical joke on the day of his heart surgery?!! Well, he had an accomplice, of course. His mother, who smiled mildly and innocently at the end of the bed while I looked around in utter amazement. Then we all tried to keep from laughing too hard, only because it was so painful for Jim when he tried to join in.
Recovering from heart surgery, smiles intact.
So, whatever troubles lay at the core of my mother-in-law’s psyche, I appreciate that she had the desire to live happily and tried to do that as much as possible. She truly loved her children and grandchildren and enjoyed so many pleasures with them. She shared what joy she found with a lot of kids during her lifetime as a teacher, and I’m sure many are grateful and remember her to this day.
The Kreativ Blogger Award
I have been nominated for The Kreativ Blogger Award by Naomi Baltuck of Writing Between the Lines. I learned more about her life in her latest post and recognized more places of resonance between us. Receiving this honor from a published writer and professional storyteller gives me a bit of a thrill, to tell the truth. Thank you, Naomi!
The rubric of the award suggests that I publish 7 facts about myself and then nominate 7 other bloggers for this award. I never consider these customs obligatory or binding, so we are all free to do with it what we will. Think of it as a collection of beads on a string, something to fiddle with if you are so inclined. Here goes:
1) My work life as of now includes hours when I am engulfed by a corset, bustle, petticoats, and a prairie bonnet. I sew pin cushions and crochet rag rugs and play the pump organ. It also includes time when I sit in my underwear at my grandmother’s cherry table in the dining room, listening to Big Band music from the 30s, bantering with my partner Steve, and cleaning up used books for shipment to new readers. And at times it includes working one-on-one with an individual who wants to learn more about vocal technique, singing, performing, and discovering the bag of sonic tricks they carry around in their bodies. I am never going back to work in a cubicle again!
2) I find looking at the sky a life-changing event.
3) I don’t have a TV, a dishwasher, a washer or a dryer anymore. I also don’t have a mortgage. Suits me just fine. I do live with approximately 30,000 books.
4) I haven’t gone to a salon for a haircut for at least 3 years. I trim off the ends myself every once in a while. Steve’s hair is almost as long as mine. A senior visitor to the living history museum where we work asked him brusquely the other day, “When was the last time you got a hair cut?!” “1882,” he replied.
5) I sing along to Broadway musicals while driving 35 miles to work. I sometimes sing along to Dvorak’s New World Symphony, too, not that there are words to it. One of my favorite lines from a musical is this: To love another person is to see the face of God. For 3 pieces of cheese, tell me what musical that’s from! (My father used to dole out precious morsels of expensive Camembert or Bleu if we were able to answer Bible questions after dinner, while he was finishing his wine.)
6) Two of the people I have loved most in my life died right next to me. My sister Alice died in the driver’s seat while I sat strapped into the passenger’s side. We were taken by surprise. That was 3 days before my 17th birthday. My husband of 24 years died beside me in bed while I lay sleeping. His kidney dialysis machine and sleep apnea machine made an uninterrupted white noise that covered any disturbance I might have heard, if there was one. I suppose I have yet to experience a death while fully conscious. I expect to get a closer look some day, and I want to be able to face it squarely.
7) I relish all kinds of hedonistic experiences now with less guilt than I was taught. I believe Shame is a great thief of holy joy. Doing nothing but gazing into the faces of the babies I bore was perhaps the beginning of his undoing in my life.
Whether or not these can be considered facts is debatable. No matter. More beads to share:
Stephen G Hipperson takes excellent photographs. Enjoy!
The Ache to Bloom is a new blog by a young writer of passionate expression. She’s also one of my children, and I hope she’ll write more.
These are the only two blogs I have begun to follow since the last time I nominated favorites for an award. You can see the other 15 here.
Thanks again, Naomi! And now to the post I promised on June 16…..
Little House in Old World Wisconsin
Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in Wisconsin in 1867, in a Little House in the Big Woods (near Pepin, WI, close to the border of Minnesota). Mary Hafford, the Irish immigrant who lived in the house where I work as an interpreter for the living history museum, Old World Wisconsin, was widowed in the year 1868 with 3 small children and lived as a renter in a small village near Watertown, WI. The Ingalls family continued to move west and eventually set up a homestead in South Dakota, but Mary Hafford worked away at her home laundry business and eventually achieved social and economic prominence in her little village. In 1885, she had a new house constructed on the property that she had bought. She never learned to read or write, but her children did. Her youngest daughter, Ellen, studied dressmaking, a skilled trade, and became a live-in dressmaker. Ellen was married in 1891 (six years after Laura Ingalls married Almanzo Wilder), and her mother hosted a reception and dinner for 75 guests. Three months later, Mary Hafford died of dropsy. I imagine Ellen Hafford Thompson and wonder what stories she might have written about her life in the Little House where she lived. I have a burning question: what happened to her older sister, Ann, who is conspicuously absent from all records from the mid-1880s on? Did she die? If so, why isn’t she buried next to her father & mother? Did she go into a convent? Did she elope with a Lutheran? The mystery remains unsolved!
The neighbors’ backyard
Trusty “Rapid Washer”
A shadow box memorial to a young woman who had taken religious vows. The braid that was cut off is all the family would ever see of this loved one after she went into the convent.
The Kiss
A selection from my file marked “Widow’s Story”:
“I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I found out that he was in the same English class as my older sister, so I gave her a note to pass to him. I fastened it with a safety pin because I didn’t want her to read it. It was decorated with doodles and stuff, like a goofy schoolgirl with a crush would send. Basically, I offered to make him a cassette tape of my parents’ PDQ Bach album because I knew he was learning some of the madrigal pieces in choir and found them very funny. He sent me a note back, or spoke to me, and we agreed that I would give him that gift the next day before he got on the bus to go to the beach with the Senior class for Sneak Day. So, early on the morning of June 8, 1978, I waited outside the school near the cul de sac where the buses would board. He came bounding up to me when he saw me, and I greeted him with a big smile, handed him the tape and wished him a good day at the beach. He smiled back with his dazzling grin, thanked me and then leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. He smiled again, turned and boarded the bus. I stood dazed on the steps for a few seconds before running off to class with a secret smirk planted on my face that must have lasted days. We talked about that first kiss a lot over the years. We celebrated that kiss forever after. At first, it was the 8th of every month that we gave each other anniversary cards and letters. Then, it was the yearly Kiss Anniversary presents of Hershey’s kisses. For 29 years we did that, sharing our chocolate mementos with children and co-workers and whoever was around on that June day to hear the story.
After the kiss came the letters. In the first one he wrote me, he said, “This is the first in a series that I will affectionately call ‘Letters to Priscilla’. In 20 years, you can toss them onto the fire and say to your husband, ‘Well, they were some good after all.’ But then again, in 20 years, maybe I’ll be your husband. Wink, wink.” He wrote that letter the night of that Senior Sneak Day. The day of our first kiss. Did he know?
The energy of that June day returned to me this morning. Lying awake beside my open window, feeling the coolness of the morning air and the promise of sunshine and heat to come, the scent of freshly-mowed grass recalled to me the old high school lawn. A certain excitement, the world about to turn in a new direction, the feeling that my real life might just be even more wonderful than my fantasies, and the realization that finally, I didn’t want to be anyone else except the person I actually am, set that energy flowing in a trickle down my face. This may be the path to acceptance after all.
Photo credit: my little brother, aged 7. I set the shot up for him on my Canon AE-1 (a gift from Jim) and asked him to do this favor for me so that I’d have a picture to take away to college. What 7 year old kid would take a photo of his big sister kissing her boyfriend? A sweet, generous one. Thanks, David. Always grateful.
The Man of My Dreams
A song from the past floats into my head as I’m falling asleep. I’m a teenager, listening to one of the first albums I bought with my own money. Barbra Streisand: A Star is Born. It’s the end of the story. Esther Hoffman Howard is a widow, taking the stage for the first time since the accident. “With one more look at you…” she begins. “I want one more look at you.” I want one more chance to put it all together and make it make sense.
My husband Jim is in my dreams again. But I don’t know I’m dreaming. I can touch him. I feel his hair, strangely coarse, actually, compared to the thick, loosely curled, soft stuff I remember. But he’s there, in the flesh, inexplicably, and so am I. I want answers. How is it you’re here again, and so often? Was I wrong when I thought you’d died? Has there been a mistake? Are you back for good? Where, exactly, have you been? Speak to me.
He begins to talk, and I hang on every word. He is telling me the secrets of the Universe, of life and death, and I had better remember this accurately later, when I wake up. When I wake up…does that mean that this is just a dream? Logic gets all loose and wiggly again, and consciousness creeps back into my head. Suddenly, I’m awake and sweating hot. I’m in a room by an open window on a street in suburban Milwaukee. And this doesn’t seem to make much sense, either.
Anger. Denial. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. What are the emotions driving these dreams? What is my subconscious trying so hard to reconcile? I keep struggling for meaning. I am angry, I suppose. I deny that Jim died at the age of 47. That was too soon. It doesn’t fit into my perception of How Things Ought To Be. I do not accept it. Even now, more than four years later. Although, even in my dreams, I know that he is dead, and that is Real.
Enlightenment is, roughly, when you accept all that is…without the ‘you’. Ego is inconsequential. Acceptance, peace, wholeness. All Is. I guess I’m not at that point yet. I work on it through the night. I imagine Jim trying to help me out, but his input just confuses me. And I’m still too involved, trying too hard to wrap my little brain around the incomprehensible. How can I simply let it go? Accept ambiguity. Accept mystery. Accept it all. Accept. Accept.
I Love My Mom
My mother makes a very satisfactory leader of my Fan Club. She is, undoubtedly, First Fan, as many mothers are. The hallmark of her grace is in the way she embodies this position, not simply as a role, but as a genuine expression. I never get the feeling that she encourages me out of obligation. I believe she really likes me. What a stroke of good fortune!
This morning I got an e-mail from her titled “catching up on the blogs”. I felt her heart bubbling over like she had just emerged from an afternoon reading a favorite novel. She had associations, appreciations, memories, connections to share, like her synapses were fireworks going off. From a reader to a writer, this has got to be the highest praise. She started off by remarking, in all caps, that there has to be a book in this somewhere and that she wants an autographed first edition. Aw, Mom!
My mom is not a literary push over. She has a degree in English from Radcliffe (now coed with Harvard). She devours books regularly and always has. Her typical posture these days is sitting in her high-backed rocker with knitting in hand, book strapped in on her reading stand, mind and fingers flying. She used to hide away in her bedroom with a bag of snacks and emerge an hour or so later with renewed energy to tackle her household obligations, sporting a kind of secret glow. Get her talking about one of her recent historical sagas, and she will enthusiastically engage for hours! I love seeing her pull thoughts that have been carefully laid aside like unmatched socks and bundle them together with a flourish of discovery and pride.
She recently told me that her doctor mentioned her good prospects for living another 20 years. That would make her 97; she wasn’t sure she’d want to live that long. But think of all the books you could still read! Or that could be read to you, if the cataracts cause the eyes to fail. I can still hear my father’s voice reading to her behind the bedroom door. His partnership to her intellectually was so rich, until Alzheimer’s whittled his brain away. I wonder if she feels the same phantom guilt I have in enjoying a healthy body and a sound mind after our husbands’ deaths. Well, I suppose consciousness is a responsibility to approach with reverence. We live, we feel, we think, we read, we make connections still. May we both bring life and light to the world like fireworks, Mom, as long as we are able.
Mom (photo credit: DKK)
scillagrace 